Health Scare: Do You Want Tom Daschle Deciding Your Fate?
Thursday, January 15th, 2009What Tom Daschle wants to do to save his fellow Senators will hurt your health and your pocketbook. From the American Spectator:
But surely Congress, even under the control of the Democrats, would never stand for such a thing. Well, the tone of Daschle’s initial Senate hearing was not encouraging for those depending on the legislature to check the excesses of the executive branch. Even the New York Times found the hearing to be nauseatingly obsequious: “The hearing before a Senate health committee was mostly a love-fest as senators from both parties expressed admiration for their former Senate colleague…” In fact, part of Daschle’s strategy for gaining congressional support for his Federal Health Board is to provide his former colleagues with political cover. As he puts it in his book, “I suspect that most members of Congress would be glad to be rid of their responsibility for controversial health policy decisions.”
And, make no mistake about it, these “controversial decisions” will produce corpses. In fact, NICE has moved beyond mere denial of life-saving medication to gravely ill patients. It has also recommended that the NHS abandon the “rule of rescue,” which requires clinicians to treat dying patients without regard to cost. The Telegraph reports, “The NHS should not always attempt to save someone’s life if the cost is too much, the medical regulator [NICE] has ruled.” But how much is “too much”? What’s a life worth? You and I might think this question hard if not impossible to answer, but NICE is not encumbered by our limitations. It has actually assigned a monetary value to human life.
Right now, as imperfect as the system is, a doctor and patient decide health care decisions. Even those who are uninsured make these choices. They are tough ones. For example, a dying patient might decide to forgo care because he doesn’t want his family burdened after he is gone with excess bills. Or maybe a person doesn’t want to suffer for months. Or maybe a person will take the suffering because he has some goals to accomplish. Or perhaps there’s an experimental treatment that is worth trying. Now, insurance companies might resist paying for certain treatments, and they do. But they have liability issues to deal with if they refuse payment on care that would save a life. They can be sued. The government can’t.
The question Americans have to ask is whether they want Tom Daschle to make these decisions for them or not. More likely, it will be one of his bureaucratic minions making the life and death decisions–like is happening in Britain. The American Spectator lays out how government controlled health care can be a cold, heartless master.
Just imagine the IRS deciding whether you live or die. Yeah, it’s not nice* to imagine.
The Economy Isn’t A Machine, It’s A Body
Thursday, January 15th, 2009Beware the “fixers”, the tinkerers, the fiddlers when it comes to the economy:
But the whole idea of fixing, running, regulating, designing, or modeling an economy rests on the notion that, if the right smart guys are at the rheostats, the economy can be ordered by intelligent design. But the economy is no mechanism. There is no mission control. Government cannot swoop down like a deus ex machina to explain the inexplicable and fix the unfixable. Why? Because the knowledge required to grasp each of the billions of actions, transactions and interconnections would fry the neural circuitry of a thousand Ben Bernankes. This is what F. A. Hayek called the knowledge problem. Knowledge, Hayek reminded us, is not concentrated among a few central authorities but is dispersed around society. That’s why bad unintended consequences follow government interventions like black swans.
A few economists have not succumbed to the “fix it” fixation. They know that society is not like a machine at all, but an ecosystem. Faster than you can say market fundamentalism, a Keynesian will scoff at this metaphor. But his favorite trope has helped to stagnate many an economy; making Rube Goldberg apparatuses out of means-ends networks, perversion out of productivity. As Czech President Vaclav Klaus wisely notes: “The market is indivisible; it cannot be an instrument at the hands of central planners.”
I’ve had more than one patient come to my office and say,”Fix me.” Oh, that it were so easy. I’d love for sick patients to have a reset button. I’d love for one adjustment to fix the whole system. Just as I bet every oncologist would love for every surgery to guarantee that the patient is “cured”. Bodies are more complex than that. So is the economy.
The economy, like a body, is a moving, breathing, changing organism responding to stresses in the environment. Many factors determine whether a body heals or dies and no doctor can magically create outcomes. A doctor can, of course, accelerate the process one way or another. But sometimes, even the best care won’t help a patient. Bad care can kill a healthy person, though. There are lots of ways to do harm to a person. That’s why the first rule of medicine is to do no harm.
Barack Obama’s advisers seem to think that the economy is some sort of car that just needs a tune-up or even a new engine and it will be all better. It’s not. Just as one man didn’t create the United States economy. One man, or ten, will not heal today’s economy. The American economy is it’s own life, with it’s own will. Too much meddling will make it sicker, not better. And the patient (all of us) have to want to get better, too. The government would do well to encourage the individuals who make up the economic body to make healthy choices. only then will the economy heal. Still, individuals make the choices.
More:
Today, those working at the frontiers of complexity science are beginning to apply Darwin’s insights to the social sciences, too. “[Economics in light of complexity] is based on the emergent behavior of systems rather than on the reductive study of them,” writes theorist Stuart Kaufmann. “It defies conventional mathematical treatments because it is not prestatable and is nonalgorithmic. Not surprisingly, most economists have so far resisted these ideas. Yet there can be little doubt that learning to apply these lessons from biology to technology will usher in a remarkable era of innovation and growth.” (Lest cries of ‘social darwinism’ go up, remember that we’re only talking about the functional aspects of an economic order, not whether a safety net is justified.)
There may come a point where biology can be reduced mathematically. I don’t know. Perhaps then, the economy will be able to be so reduced, too. Until that magic formula is found, policy makers need to stop acting like their non-stop interventions are making the difference. Forget spoiling the soup, they risk killing the patient.
H/T Instapundit
Cross-posted at RightWingNews
Cancer Free Baby?
Tuesday, January 13th, 2009Trading Six Babies For One Healthy One
For one possibly healthy one. Maybe.
Global Warming Frozen In Bad Data
Thursday, December 11th, 2008From the Washington Times:
Environmental extremists and global warming alarmists are in denial and running for cover. Their rationale for continuing a lost cause is that weather events in the short term are not necessarily related to long-term climatic trends. But these are the same people who screamed at us each year that ordinary weather events such as high temperatures or hurricanes were undeniable evidence of imminent doom.
Now that global warming is over, politicians are finally ready to enact dubious solutions to a non-existent problem. In Britain, Parliament is intrepidly forging ahead with a bold new plan to cool the climate, even as London experienced its first October snowfall since 1934 and Ireland went through the coldest October in the last 70 years.
This is an absurd spectacle. Our advanced civilization is being systematically mismanaged by technologically illiterate lawyers responding to political pressures from irrational fanatics. Would someone please tell these people it is impossible to overturn the laws of thermodynamics?
We cannot improve our economy by artificially forcing people to use expensive, unreliable and inefficient energy sources.
From the U.S. Senate committee on Environment:
“I am a skeptic…Global warming has become a new religion.” – Nobel Prize Winner for Physics, Ivar Giaever.
“Since I am no longer affiliated with any organization nor receiving any funding, I can speak quite frankly….As a scientist I remain skeptical.” – Atmospheric Scientist Dr. Joanne Simpson, the first woman in the world to receive a PhD in meteorology and formerly of NASA who has authored more than 190 studies and has been called “among the most preeminent scientists of the last 100 years.”
Warming fears are the “worst scientific scandal in the history…When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists.” – UN IPCC Japanese Scientist Dr. Kiminori Itoh, an award-winning PhD environmental physical chemist.
“The IPCC has actually become a closed circuit; it doesn’t listen to others. It doesn’t have open minds… I am really amazed that the Nobel Peace Prize has been given on scientifically incorrect conclusions by people who are not geologists,” – Indian geologist Dr. Arun D. Ahluwalia at Punjab University and a board member of the UN-supported International Year of the Planet.
“The models and forecasts of the UN IPCC “are incorrect because they only are based on mathematical models and presented results at scenarios that do not include, for example, solar activity.” – Victor Manuel Velasco Herrera, a researcher at the Institute of Geophysics of the National Autonomous University of Mexico
“It is a blatant lie put forth in the media that makes it seem there is only a fringe of scientists who don’t buy into anthropogenic global warming.” – U.S Government Atmospheric Scientist Stanley B. Goldenberg of the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA.
“Even doubling or tripling the amount of carbon dioxide will virtually have little impact, as water vapour and water condensed on particles as clouds dominate the worldwide scene and always will.” – . Geoffrey G. Duffy, a professor in the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering of the University of Auckland, NZ.
“After reading [UN IPCC chairman] Pachauri’s asinine comment [comparing skeptics to] Flat Earthers, it’s hard to remain quiet.” – Climate statistician Dr. William M. Briggs, who specializes in the statistics of forecast evaluation, serves on the American Meteorological Society’s Probability and Statistics Committee and is an Associate Editor of Monthly Weather Review.
“For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming? For how many years must cooling go on?” – Geologist Dr. David Gee the chairman of the science committee of the 2008 International Geological Congress who has authored 130 plus peer reviewed papers, and is currently at Uppsala University in Sweden.
“Gore prompted me to start delving into the science again and I quickly found myself solidly in the skeptic camp…Climate models can at best be useful for explaining climate changes after the fact.” – Meteorologist Hajo Smit of Holland, who reversed his belief in man-made warming to become a skeptic, is a former member of the Dutch UN IPCC committee.
“Many [scientists] are now searching for a way to back out quietly (from promoting warming fears), without having their professional careers ruined.” – Atmospheric physicist James A. Peden, formerly of the Space Research and Coordination Center in Pittsburgh.
“Creating an ideology pegged to carbon dioxide is a dangerous nonsense…The present alarm on climate change is an instrument of social control, a pretext for major businesses and political battle. It became an ideology, which is concerning.” – Environmental Scientist Professor Delgado Domingos of Portugal, the founder of the Numerical Weather Forecast group, has more than 150 published articles.
The problem with this nonsense is that people will believe nothing and therefore everything in the future. Everybody is lying, therefore there is no objective truth.
Climate scientists risk losing all credibility. Science in general will be a victim. Just as the Catholic church lost believers over their collusion with abominable sinning caused loss of faith generally in religious institutions.
H/T High Plains Blogger, my friend from Twitter
Cross-posted at RightWingNews.com
Sperm Donor Fathers 46 Kids
Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008Sperm Donor Fathers 46 Kids
Hope he’s a decent guy and not some sort of mutant.
Protein Wisdom: Understanding Embryonic Stem Cell Issues
Sunday, November 16th, 2008Protein Wisdom: Understanding Embryonic Stem Cell Issues
The new Administration’s unethical rhetoric and actions.
Memory Making
Saturday, September 6th, 2008Glenn Reynolds muses about memory:
My question is, why is there so much room? I was listening to Santana’s Moonflower in the car a while ago, which I’ve barely listened to since college, and not only did I realize that all the licks were stored in my brain, I actually found myself noticing when skips that were present on my original vinyl version didn’t appear in the new one. What a waste of brain cells! And yet, I often have trouble remembering more mundane things, and always have. Seems like the storage part is easier than the retrieval part. (In high-school, we used to joke about Write-Only Memory). This might prove a major handicap if people live longer, requiring some sort of memory training. Or we could do what the Google generation does, and not try to remember anything, since you can just look it up . . . .
It seems like everything gets laid down somewhere, compressed for efficiency, and then retrieved but maybe, like Google, brought up in an unrelated but associated place. The brain has some sort of hierarchy for deciding what is important, but what is it?
And memories are like reliving the actual event, which is a reason why I question the helpfulness of abuse victims going to therapy and talking about the abuse. Are we sure that doing such a thing is helpful?
Experts said the study had all but closed the case: For the brain, remembering is a lot like doing (at least in the short term, as the research says nothing about more distant memories).
On the other hand, reliving a memory can be helpful. My high school basketball coach instructed us to shoot 100 free throws before we went to sleep every night. We were a better than 90% free throw shooting team. I think it worked. (This also prompted basketball dreams, too.)
Orgasm Ability: A Compelling Reason To Get Your Woman To A Chiropractor
Friday, September 5th, 2008This research (granted, it’s a small study) shared via Instapundit:
The results showed that the appropriately trained sexologists were able to correctly infer vaginal orgasm through watching the way the women walked over 80 percent of the time. Further analysis revealed that the sum of stride length and vertebral rotation was greater for the vaginally orgasmic women. “This could reflect the free, unblocked energetic flow from the legs through the pelvis to the spine,” the authors note.
Keep that lumbar spine limber, folks. It could have serious implications. And just as an aside, I have noticed that guys with prostate problems have restricted gaits, as well. The nerves that feed the pelvic musculoskeletal system feed the reproductive system, the musculoskeletal system supports the reproductive system. It’s all connected. Conversely, sex inhibits pain and relaxes the body including the pelvis.
Generally, being a tight-ass isn’t good for your health or your sex life. Of course, maybe it’s genetic. But that idea is just plain defeating. So, you have a restricted gait, you were born that way? And that indicates a genetic inability to orgasm? Now, that idea might get some money funneling into genetic research pronto. In addition, I can see the implications for embryonic selection based on vitally important genetic disorders like anorgasmia.
Or, you could go to a chiropractor and get that restricted gait corrected.
Cross-posted at RightWingNews
